With the advent of the advanced intelligent network (AIN), it has become possible to rapidly design and introduce many new enhanced telecommunications services that provide subscribers with added flexibility and convenience in the use of telephone equipment. Examples of such services are free phone (FPH) services such as time dependent routing, calling card (CCD) services, virtual private network (VPN) services and personal 1-800 services.
In the advanced intelligent network, new services are typically designed in a service creation environment. After a service has been created, it needs to be bundled together, engineered, deployed and initially provisioned before it is capable of carrying live traffic on the network. The engineering process provides engineering data for the operating environment in which the service will be deployed.
Conventional methods for engineering a service in an advanced intelligent network suffer several disadvantages. For example, the engineering data is manually determined and entered by a programmer, which is time consuming, expensive and prone to mistakes. In addition, engineered services generally cannot be modified. As a result, engineered services cannot be corrected in case of mistakes or redeployed to other operating environments.